


Five Reasons Vala Started Wearing Pigtails

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 100-1000 Words, 5 Things, Community: sg1_five_things, Gen, Seduction, Word Play, head hair, self-soothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-12
Updated: 2007-03-12
Packaged: 2017-10-08 12:45:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/75782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks to msbeata for the tip about 'dog's ears.'</p></blockquote>





	Five Reasons Vala Started Wearing Pigtails

Nobody around her wears their hair in that fashion, and she is nothing if not one-of-a-kind.

Since she came to live on this planet, in this mountain, they provide an extra little something for her to do with her hands, a soothing ritual of self-grooming as she parts and brushes her hair and winds the bands around her fingers and pulls the thick, soft hair through. She puts up her hair for the same reason Teal'c still meditates and Daniel draws absurd doodles in the margins of his notes and Mitchell sorts and re-sorts and lists and categorizes and re-categorizes his gear before and during and after missions. It calms her, and centers her in herself. Late at night in the relative privacy of her quarters, she puts her hair in curlers and then straightens it, braids it and then brushes it out -- indulges in more complex and languid play. In the morning, as she readies herself for what she hopes will be an engaging and demanding and please-just-anything-but-boring day, the simple pleasure of gathering her hair to each side and fixing it tidily in place is enough, but it has become integral to her routine, and without it she would not feel herself.

They're adorably cute. _Adorably._ They're charming and girlish and you can fling them prettily about when you toss your head. They're distracting and disarming and they give her a deceptive look of openness and innocence. They make people underestimate her. Being taken for a little girl or a silly git is incalculably useful, and the childish look of pigtails combined with the mammalian fertility indicator of long hair does things to the male libido that most males keep themselves blissfully unaware of and yet are subliminally and deeply affected by, which makes them even more useful still.

They keep the hair out of her face when she's leaning down to work on a device or investigate something interesting, when she's fighting for her life, when she's piloting a starship -- whenever she's trying to do anything, really. Chopping her hair short would serve the same utilitarian purpose but fail to convey the ingenuousness she finds so useful; she considers it briefly when she finds out that if she styled it a certain way and applied a great deal of grease she would be wearing something called "a duck's ass" on her head ... but the shearing-short would also amount to capitulation to the culture of the Terran military, and she's capitulated in too many ways already. Pulling her hair back into what the Terrans so whimsically liken to a pony's tail would be little better than chopping it all off, and rather than making her look charmingly girlish would lend a severity to her visage that simply would not do at all. The pigtails allow her to see clearly while ensuring that she is seen only in the way she wishes to be.

Parting her hair where they do, they bare a spot just at the base of her skull, just above the nape of her neck, that when it's brushed with light fingertips sends a thrill of gooseflesh over her entire body, an orgasmic yet asexual ecstasy. The first of her new teammates who discovers this fact will be well rewarded. None of them has yet. In the meantime, she muses on how much their terminology -- ponytail, ducktail, pigtails, gooseflesh -- has taught her about Earth's indigenous fauna. When she found out what pigs are, she was puzzled by the term "pigtails" being applied to her chosen hairstyle even though the "tails" weren't braided into little curlicues; they seemed more like the tails of a pony with a rather unusual anatomy. Then she was informed that in some regions, such unbraided pigtails are known as "dog's ears." She finds that much more satisfactory.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to msbeata for the tip about 'dog's ears.'


End file.
